Yubico hardware authentication through Lightning coming to the iPhone and iPad

Yubico has received MFi certification from Apple, meaning that there is a Lightning YubiKey dongle for authentication coming to the iPhone and iPad soon.

Lightning and USB-C YubiKey prototype

Yubico announced on Tuesday that it received hardware certification for the Yubikey technology for Lightning. There is no functional hardware available yet, however.

While the Yubico SDK does have Lightning support, Apple's hardware and software itself does not support the open-source FIDO2 authentication —at least not release versions yet. The company says that it will lean heavily on developers for enabling this authentication, and there is some work that coders will have to do to enable the apps to work with the Lightning version of the key.

The SDK to develop software for the dongle is already available. The NFC version of the YubiKey can already be used to authenticate apps.

iPhone 7 and the NFC YubiKey

There are no partners announced for the Lightning version as of yet. Yubico says that "Today the YubiKey for Lightning is in private preview to selected participants in the Yubikey for Lightning Program, with general availability still to be announced."

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